Million Mile Road Trip

by Rudy Rucker

  “You mean smell?”

  “Smeeeel. Your scientists don’t study smeel. It’s mind stuff. You and I have heaps of smeel. Rocks—a rudimentary ration. Where’s my ladder?”

  “When Mom came, I slid the ladder inside the floating saucer pearl,” says Zoe. “And the pearl shrank, and now it’s in my pocket.”

  “Show me,” says Yampa. “Later you’ll play to the pearl again, and it’ll make a tunnel to mappyworld. For now, I need to know no noxious critters have crept through the pearl’s passage. Perhaps the saucers sense the significance of what Pinchley and I seek, and they sent small saucers for sabotage.”

  Zoe shoves her hand down into her jeans and finds the fat pearl with her fingers. And, oh wow, she must not have shut the pearl’s gate tight. Because—there’s critters in her pocket. Tickling her palm and nipping her fingertips. She snatches her hand from her pocket and finds two little round disks stuck to her palm, blue in the middle with yellow rims, each with a tiny, baleful, red eye. Leech saucers?

  Yampa makes a sound pretty much like Aaaaak! And now Yampa’s many fingers are worming all over Zoe’s hand, popping those two saucers. The popped saucers leave spots of blood on Zoe’s palm. They were feeding on her like ticks, drawing off some blood along with the—smeel?

  Without slowing down, Yampa wriggles a hand down into Zoe’s pocket and does a search and pinch routine. To Zoe it feels like a micro mosh-pit in her pants.

  Yampa’s cleanup doesn’t fully achieve its goal—a third tiny bright saucer squirms out through the seam of Zoe’s jeans. It has a yellow dome set onto a floppy white rim—like a tiny fried egg. Like the others, the dome has a little red eye on it. In a heartbeat the saucer has zoomed out the window.

  “Thudd dung,” exclaims Yampa, and she pulls the pearl from Zoe’s pocket. “The pearl is totally transparent. The gate gapes. Be quick and close it!”

  “Smash the pearl with a hammer?” asks Zoe, frantically fumbling with her jewelry tools.

  “No, no, no,” says Yampa, talking very fast. “Toot your tune. You played the pearl open. And now you serenade it shut. Zip zap, Zoe Snapp.”

  “Why—why do you call it a saucer pearl anyway?” asks Zoe.

  “Every saucer carries such a pearl at its private core,” says Yampa, shortly. “The pearls help them levitate. Now hurry and close your pearl.”

  With shaking hands Zoe gets out her trumpet and plays one of her special bits—a sarcastic bebop lullaby. And then she tacks on Maisie’s little riff—played backwards. All at once the saucer pearl isn’t transparent anymore. It’s solid and iridescent like it was at the start. The gate is closed.

  “Good,” goes Yampa. “As for the escaped small saucer, he’ll try to trail us to mappyworld. He’ll leech onto us when we leave. He’ll be fat and full of stolen smeel. We’ll do best to burst him, yes.”

  5. Augmented Whale

  SCUD

  Scud watches Pinchley prepare to do his alien mechanic routine. Pinchley pats the dark tool belt he laid on the whale’s finder. “It’s made of genuine ant leather,” he tells Scud.

  Scud loves it. “Isn’t this awesome, Villy? But, wait, ants don’t have leather, Mr. Pinchley. They’re stiff. And tiny.”

  “Ants in mappyworld got leather,” says Pinchley, opening one of his belt’s compartments. “They’re wiggly, and they hella big. Don’t call me mister. I’m twenty-three of your years old. My woman Yampa, she’s twenty-six. With a powerful yen for cool mechanic-type guys like me. I got her dazzled! Not that Yampa would flat-out say so.”

  Pinchley takes something squirmy out of his ant-leather tool belt. It’s a little tan pancake that’s alive. He holds it at some distance from his body, using a pair of fingers that he’s shaped into a claw.

  “I’m upgrading you boys to what you’d call a dark-energy motor,” Pinchley tells Scud. He adds a sound effect. “Vooo-don va vooo-don. Don’t need none of that stinky gasoline for this rig. Your engine’ll be smarter than six schoolteachers.” He leans under the hood and tosses the pancake onto the top of Villy’s old mill.

  The pancake thins like a puddle of batter, running down onto every side of the purple whale’s engine. The alien goo eats away at the Detroit iron, reshaping it, transforming it, bringing it to life. Scud’s dangling wires are gone.

  “Wait—” begins Villy, obviously worried. But already the change is done. The thin slime pulls itself back together, forming a tidy pancake resting on top of—

  “That’s your dark-energy motor right there,” says Pinchley. He whistles admiringly. The smell of his breath is hard to take. “I bought this fancy flapjack off a Rubtan in Szep City.”

  The new engine has a glossy sci-fi look—it’s a nest of gold and chrome tubes supporting a transparent sphere with soft green sparks amid a lavender glow. Branching sparks stream from the orb’s center, and they spiderweb across the ball’s glassy inner surface. A dark-energy turbine. An eccentric train of asymmetric gears runs from the sphere to the purple whale’s earthbound grease-and-metal transmission.

  “Good thing your whale’s not in gear,” Pinchley tells Villy. “My motor’s ready to roll your heap at a thousand miles per. And then some. Look inside at the dash. That smart engine pancake upgraded your speedometer too.”

  “Jeez,” says Villy, peering in. “The dial goes up to—three thousand miles an hour?”

  “Well, the pancake likes to exaggerate,” says Pinchley. “Truth be told, you’ll be lucky to go faster than two K. And you’d want a nice clear stretch of land.”

  “My tires will burst,” protests Villy. “The shocks will bottom out. My car will catch fire and burn down to the metal.”

  “Don’t sweat it none,” says Pinchley. “We not done tinkerin yet.”

  “But why do we have to drive so fast?” interrupts Scud.

  “Do some math there, Scud. I already told you we’re driving a whole million miles, didn’t I? To hit Szep City in less than three months, we want to make ten or fifteen thousand miles a day. A wild mappyworld run.” Pinchley craggy face splits in a reckless grin.

  “What do you mean when you say your world is mappy?” presses Scud. He doesn’t like mysteries.

  Pinchley fields this one too. “It means we don’t live on round balls. No planets. Our world’s one giant continent with mountains cutting it into basins—and no end in sight. Each basin matches a settled planet of your world. But not like a twin, not even like a sister or a brother. More like a third cousin. Why? Nobody knows. Mappyworld grows itself, ballyworld grows itself, and they in sync. Chicken and egg.”

  “Icken and chegg,” puts in Villy, maybe doing this to mess with Scud’s head.

  “Can you say our ballyworld is regular matter, and your mappyworld is dark matter?” persists Scud.

  “You could say that if you wanted,” says Pinchley. “But likely you’d be talkin’ out your ass.”

  “Let me ask you this,” says Villy, not wanting Scud to go off on one of his science tangents. “Does mappyworld have highways?”

  “Hell no,” says Pinchley. “Pretty much the whole million mile drive is gonna be off road. Which is why I’m fixing to make your mommy-wagon look like a bad-ass monster truck.”

  Villy looks annoyed. “If you want to dis my bitchin’ purple whale, you can go and—”

  For no reason in particular, Pinchley switches to a silly fake-Dutch accent. “Vait till you see, Villy und Scood van Antverpen. Zee mappyvorld iss voonderful.”

  It hits Scud that whatever accent Pinchley talks in, it’s always going to be a goof the alien is running in his head. This guy is very far indeed from being any kind of local yokel.

  Pinchley takes two more tools from his belt. One is a little orange bird. She has bead-bright blue eyes on either side of a black beak. Her beak is soft and moist like a dog’s nose. The other tool looks like a birthday-party water balloon, long and waggy, pale blue with two glowing red eyes. The balloon is oozing slime on Pinchley’s hand, with a putrid smell coming off the slime.<
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  “Nasty but he’s nice,” says Pinchley, not at all upset. He flips the balloon onto the floor.

  “Splat!” yells Scud, feeling joyful. But, no, the balloon critter doesn’t burst. It humps along the floor like a worm, making his way beneath the purple whale.

  “Gonna rock some quantum shocks,” says Pinchley. “Smooth as snot on a doorknob, feller says.” He’s giving off an allspice smell with a rubbing-alcohol edge.

  The balloon creature makes odd noises under the car: ping, hiss, and gronk. The left front corner of the whale rises at an awkward angle, with the fender way higher than the tire. And now the right front end of the car rises up as well, tilting the car’s body backwards.

  “Bucking bronc!” says Scud. He’s feeling giddy from Pinchley’s fumes.

  More squeaking and whooshing, and now the whole car is up high, like the pickups that the mountain rednecks drive. The balloon creeps out from beneath the truck—damp, deflated, triumphant. Pinchley stashes it in his ant-leather tool belt.

  “What was inside it?” asks Scud.

  “Nothing but nothing.” says Pinchley. “Call it quantum foam? It ate whatever rusty crud you had under there before. And now you got force fields instead. Quantum shocks. This permutated whale’s gonna haul ass across them rocks and rills.”

  “But my feeble little tires aren’t—” begins Villy.

  “Watch the birdie,” interrupts Pinchley. “She’s gonna do like a magic marker. Physical graffiti, boys. Scribble on them tires and they get fat.”

  “Let me do it!” says Scud, and Pinchley hands him the marker bird.

  Scud kneels down by the left front wheel and presses the orange bird’s damp, dank beak against the tire. The creature twitches violently, gets halfway free from Scud’s grip, and claws his hand. Scud hollers and drops the bird. She hops onto the tire and begins scribbling on her own.

  “Likes to do it herself,” says Pinchley.

  “Why didn’t you warn me?” whines Scud.

  “Maybe I like to hear a greenhorn yell,” says Pinchley flat-out. “Maybe I shouldn’t admit it? We’ll be friends anyway, and don’t you mind my pranks. Long trip ahead.”

  The marker bird finishes the left front tire and moves on to the next. That first tire is shifting and swelling, filling in the space that the high quantum shocks have freed, and my god, the tire is nearly six feet tall, with heavy-duty corrugations sticking out like the teeth on a gear. Scud raps his knuckles on the transmuted, amplified tire. Taut, squeaky, firm.

  “Tessellated carbon,” says Pinchley. “Graphene. These tires roll true blue. I clocked a set at four thousand miles an hour on a desert. Woulda been fine, except I ran over a toothpick and went ass over teakettle. Lucky I landed on my head.” He stares at Scud, with his weird, lumpy jaw working. “That’s a joke, son.”

  “But what about accidents?” asks Scud, who’s prone to worrying, even though he knows it seems wimpy. “What if you do crash going at a speed like that?”

  “The space inside our car stiffens up with Truban inertia gel. It’s like you’re packed in bubble-wrap during the crash. And then you jump outta your car and yell at the other guy. Not that there’s much left of him to yell at. Unless he’s got that special Truban inertia gel himself.”

  With all the tires done, the marker bird perches on the purple whale’s roof rack, which is nearly touching the garage rafters. Leaning over the door frame, the marker bird makes a choking sound—and extrudes a rubbery black rope that she affixes to the roof with a brisk peck.

  “What you might call a bungee cord,” says Pinchley. “For climbing in and out of this rig. We gonna be growing the wheels even bigger in mappyworld.”

  Meanwhile the marker bird hops around the roof and squeezes out a dangling rope for each of the car’s four doors. By way of finishing off her work, she lowers herself down each of the ropes in turn, moving upside down like a nuthatch, fastening the four flexible cords at the bottoms of the door frames and leaving long ends dangling.

  “Good girl,” says Pinchley. He coaxes the bird to his hand with a morsel of food and stashes her in his tool belt.

  “I still don’t get what’s in this for you,” says Villy. He looks uneasy.

  “The great Goob-goob hired Yampa and me to fetch back some humans so we could equip you for the cosmic beatdown comin’ down,” says Pinchley. “So we drove a million miles to New Eden—which is just a hop through unspace and a drive over the ridge from here—and we connected with Zoe’s sister Maisie. Maisie recommended that we pick up you and your girlfriend Zoe. She said you two were meant to be intergalactic heroes.”

  “Oh come on,” says Villy. “There’s got to be another angle. Something that you yourself get.”

  “Wal, okay,” says Pinchley. “Down to brass tacks. Would you have any caraway seeds in the house?”

  “Caraway seeds?” echoes Villy. “Is this, like, the world’s most complicated joke? Caraway seeds from rye bread?”

  “Mom used to put them in her pork stew!” exclaims Scud. He’s proud of remembering this. And glad for a chance to mention Mom. He speeds off to the kitchen, rattles around, and about forty-five seconds later he’s back with a spice jar of curvy little caraway seeds.

  Pinchley is exceedingly pleased. And now he comes up with another request. “Chocolate?”

  “We had some last week,” says Scud. “But I ate it.”

  “Never mind,” says Pinchley. “Yampa will score chocolate from Zoe, no doubt. Yampa and me are wild about that stuff. It gets us high. And the caraway seeds make us healthy. Gimme, Scud.” He holds out his yellow many-fingered hand.

  “Maybe I keep the seeds for now,” says Scud, and stuffs the jar down into his pants pocket. He wants to keep whatever leverage he has. He worries that Pinchley and Villy might get sick of him, and throw him off the trip. In certain moods, Villy can be mean. In the old days, Mom would always stick up for Scud. Now that Scud’s alone, he has to be sly.

  Meanwhile Villy’s climbed up behind the whale’s steering wheel. He bounces on the seat, turning the car’s giant front tires back and forth. He looks eager to go—and perfectly happy with having Scud come too.

  “Zoe’s expecting us,” Villy tells Scud as he hops down from the car. “We need to grab whatever we want to bring on the trip. And you should say goodbye to Pop.”

  Walking down the hall past his parents’ bedroom, Scud wishes for the thousandth time that Mom might somehow be in her old room. I mean, sure, he went to her funeral and saw the horrible little box that was supposed to be her ashes, but maybe? How can a person totally disappear from one day to the next?

  Going into his own room, Scud thinks of something that makes him stand stock still. Maybe there’s a copy of Mom in mappyworld? Maybe Scud will see her. Thinking about this makes him feel sick with longing. Mom was the one who loved him, the one who cared. On the other hand, what if the mappyworld copy of Mom is somehow—wrong?

  Scud does his best to close down that spooky thought. This trip is supposed to be science. It’s his best subject at school. He doesn’t flunk math tests like Villy. Villy is good with his hands and good at videogames and he can surf, but he’s bad in school. It’s not Scud who’s the idiot around here.

  Scud likes science because it’s logical, with no chance of a horrible surprise darting out at him. A horrible surprise like Mom staying home from work with a sore hip one day, and two months later Pop is showing Scud a little can of gray ashes with bone chips, and that’s supposed to be Mom? The can was so light. Scud wishes he hadn’t touched it.

  Okay, snap out of it, what is he supposed to be doing here in his bedroom? Oh, right, pack some things for this insane trip. Bring stuff he can barter with the aliens. He has a diamondback rattlesnake skin that he likes, and a box of foreign coins. Maybe his video drone with linked goggles? A few months ago, he used the drone to see the neighbor woman naked by her pool, not that he was specifically interested in that particular woman in that way, but seeing her naked was
something to brag about to his friends. Like seeing a black widow spider, or finding a tiny nugget of gold. The female of the species.

  Rooting around his room and muttering to himself, Scud puts stuff inside his knapsack. His throwing knife of course. A sweatshirt. A second pair of underwear—for sure that’s something Mom would have told him to bring. A pencil sharpener shaped like an Earth globe—he can astound the aliens with that. How can those guys be living on a flat, endless landscape? Where do they put their sun?

  Scud would like to bring his binoculars, but his binoculars are hiding as usual. Scud hates them for that. And he’ll leave the drone and goggles—they’re too big.And the foreign coins are too heavy. But he’ll bring a couple of his fossils. He collected them himself from cliffs near the beach. The fossils are like smooth black rocks with white patterns in them—primeval shells and crinoid stalks and crawly trilobites. Scud is good at finding things. Except for those bastard-ass binoculars. Never mind them. He grabs three of his best fossils. Supposedly they’re three million years old.

  “Let’s go!” yells Villy, out in the hall. He’s filled a knapsack of his own. “Did you tell Pop you’re leaving?”

  “Let’s just go,” mutters Scud. “Pop doesn’t care what I do.” It hurts to say this. It makes Scud feel hollow in the middle of his chest. But there’s a certain resentful satisfaction in being bitter.

  “Whatever,” says Villy, who doesn’t seem to be in a mood to indulge Scud’s drama. He glances into Scud’s pack. “You’re bringing those stupid fossils?”

  “Yeah. And I bet you’re bringing your stupid surfboards.”

  “My personal treasures, yes,” says Villy, cracking a smile. “This is going to be fun. I can’t wait to get on the road and see how our augmented whale handles.”

  “Be sure to drive carefully,” says Scud. “I’m too young to die.”

  “So stay home, why don’t you?”

  “I’m coming! But I’m scared.”

  “I’ll take care of you, little dude.” Villy throws a brotherly arm across Scud’s shoulder and they head down the hall towards the garage. Right at the door there, Villy pauses and scribbles a note for Pop on the family whiteboard—a note that says he’s taking Scud.